Members of the Cantabria community found a giant squid washed up on La Arena beach Tuesday. The squid is 30 feet long, weights 400 pounds and belongs to the Architeuthis dux species, the largest invertebrates on Earth.

An underwater photographer named Enrique Talledo was on the beach at the time it washed ashore.

"I felt privileged to be among a few, these animals rarely can be seen, because they live at great depths and very few appear on the coast dead," he told LiveScience. "Its appearance is similar to a sea monster, well-adapted to life in the depths."

This is not the first time one of Architeuthis' kind has been seen. Last year, Tokyo zoologist Tsunemi Kubodera, of Japan's National Science Museum, tracked and shot the first live footage of one of the giant squids in its natural habitat.

"It was shining and so beautiful," Kubodera told AFP at the time. "I was so thrilled when I saw it first hand, but I was confident we would because we rigorously researched the areas we might find it, based on past data."

Kubodera's team found the creature about 620 miles south of Tokyo, off the coast of the Ogasawara Islands and at a depth of about 2,066 feet.

Perhaps the most attention-grabbing trait of the giant squid is its eyes. Architeuthis are not only the largest invertebrates, but they also have the largest eyes in the animal kingdom. The beast's eye is about the size of a human head.

The mysterious and elusive giant squid is believed to have inspired such fictional creatures as the Norse legend of the Kraken and the Greek mythology of Scylla.